Wow, I checked out Air too and it sure seems cool. The things that could be accomplished once this becomes mainstream...I'm thinking along the lines of internet centric PCs or notebooks.

I tried out the AOL Videos app though and was a little disappointed. It doesn't seem to run all that smoothly. I'm not going to pretend I have a top of the line computer but it's better than average. This application's performance was similar to those completely Flash sites one sometimes stumbles across while browsing. By that I mean, unresponsive, slow frame rates and generally irritating. We all know and hate those I'm sure.

I'm very interested in seeing what Microsoft comes out with. Weren't you saying in a previous post that Silverlight has this same sort of functionality. I can't remember.

Anyways I tried the Live Skydrive storage but it's worthless to me with a desktop option like AOL's Xdrive. I don't know if I want to get into that yet though. The plus of Skydrive is that one account is supported by all of Windows Live utilities.

Thanks for the informative article Joe.

Why hasn't Microsoft been able to produce something like AIR? What is it about Microsoft engineering or management or marketing or legal that prevents them from doing what really needs to be done?

What is it about a multi-billion dollar company that makes them dumb as a fence post when it comes to necessary innovation?

Is it Ballmer? Get another CEO. He's spent more than 40% of shareholder value since 2000 and he's managed to lose $60billion in shareholder value in just a few weeks.

Is it Ozzie? Get another CTO. There are fry cooks at Crystal Burger that can get more out of management than what he's brought.

Is it Gates? Get him a box of condoms and send him to India... wearing them.

When will gigantic monolithic companies become greater than the sum of their least effective people?

Never.

And, by the way, Jim; Silverlight does not have the same functionality as AIR. In fact, Silverlight 2.0 based on what little has been allowed to see daylight from Microsoft indicates AIR is many years ahead of Silverlight.

Silverlight is a typical response from a typical effort by a typical management cowing a typical engineering staff with typical lawyers in a typically crippled company.

It's what you might have expected in Microsoft and Ray Ozzie will have to strut across the MIX 08 stage in peacock feathers and a jock strap singing Mammy to be able to match the future show in AIR.

Microsoft lost this gamble big time and they've taken another step toward being dismantled by their investors.

I guess I might be interested if Adobe ever releases a flash player that works with 64-Bit Linux. Flash has become like a standard piece of the web browsing experience that you would expect to keep up with operating systems and web browsers. And 64-Bit Linux has been available for how long now?!?! I don't expect too much when trying the latest operating systems. But, I do expect a working web browser, Firefox. A working Java Runtime Environment, which Sun is up to date with. And Flash!!! You come to put trust in a company to provide a mainstream capability and this lack of support shows how much they support the users. So, Adobe could take whatever is supposed to be the next thing and sell it to the Microsoft community, and maybe Apple, if Adobe happens to feel as though Apple is worthy... But, as a user of multiple operating systems, I won't count on Adobe to support all of my needs.

Yes, Microsoft is way behind the eightball, and Silverlight barely touches what AIR is capable of. Silverlight is more in the competition space with Adobe Flex (to which it's still behind). AIR can do, not only rich Flash/Flex based desktop applications, but HTML/Ajax based desktop applications as well.

Adobe's showcase has several projects by Jack Slocum, primary author of the ExtJS component library, which are extremely impressive on their own. Especially when you consider they don't use Flash, and interact with the desktop as well as the web, and the bundled SQLLite database.

Microsoft has a history of being behind the times when it comes to the web. They were late in the game to introduce a browser, and bullied the world into a substandard security nightmare that is only now finally losing it's ground (when they finally appear to be moving in the right direction, though too slowly). They are even further behind now, trying to position Silverlight against Flex and Flash, and their track record procedes them.

To Tom, what do you expect? How many 64-bit Linux desktops (not servers) do you really think existed until a year ago? Or even now? I wouldn't develop for it either, the return isn't worth the investment. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if they're working on it. Flex Builder for Linux is in beta (according to the Adobe Labs site). So...who knows? You might see it soon. If you don't, I wouldn't blame them (what are you talking about? .5% share of the desktop market? Maybe?), but, you never know...